Stories with the terrain, stories with the ice: Storytelling as a socio-material practice

Abstract

This article argues for the importance of understanding storytelling as a socio-material practice growing from engagements with the environment and its constituents. Based on an ethnography of guided tours on Svalbard, the article reveals how storytelling arises from encounters and engagements with particular constituents of the environment, such as terrain or ice, as well as from bodily experiences such as walking, feeling, touching, looking or (not) hearing. The practice of storytelling then shifts looking at and receiving information about something to seeing and knowing it through embodied experience – a shift that is, however, limited by incommensurable temporalities of diverse constituents of the environment. Storytelling as a practice thus contains not only verbal information about miners or (glacier) ice but also arises from and shapes the ways of being with (constituents of) the environment, knowing them and seeing them. Consequentially, relations between the tour group and the terrain, ice or weather elements that are emerging, are all a configurative part of the socio-material practice of storytelling.